ATO hit with fresh online services outage

The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has recovered from a fresh outage to its online services, but insisted that the issue was unrelated to the SAN system failure that triggered last year's major outages.

A disruption yesterday afternoon required the agency to briefly take its online services offline while it rebooted the mainframe.

The mainframe had been impacted by intermittent system issues caused by certain applications running incorrectly, the ATO said.

The decision to reboot the mainframe was to ensure the ATO's web services were fully operational in time for the 8.00 pm to 9.00 pm peak usage window.

According to the agency the issues impacted ATO Online services, the Tax Agent, Business and BAS Agent Portals, Standard Business Reporting, the Australian Business Register and the ATO's case management systems. But the website itself remained online.

The disruption comes in the wake of a series of outages of the ATO's online systems in December last year and February this year. A recent report into the outages traced the issue to a failure of the HPE-provided storage area network (SAN) due to hardware and software errors and the misconfiguration of error reporting and backup systems.

In the wake of the failures, HPE rebuilt its storage system with a new SAN and plans to decommission the old system for forensic analysis once the data transfer process is complete.

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